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my eyes. “Yes, Jaco.”
    Sniffing the air as if something stunk in the room, he went on as if I hadn’t spoken. “Perhaps the most unscrupulous I have ever done business with.”
    I tapped my front tooth with a fingernail. “Jaco, we’ve had this conversation before. You always say the same thing: I’m a crook, a bitch…always the same spring rolls. But I find the books you want. You wanted a signed first edition of The Gallery ; I got it for you. You wanted a letter from Eliot, I found it for you—”
    “True, but then you charge so much that I have no money left!”
    “You’d have to live another four hundred years before you ran out of money. Don’t buy it! You know Dagmar will if you don’t.” It was a rotten thing to say, but I was so disgusted with him at the moment I couldn’t resist.
    As usual, her detested name straightened his back and narrowed his greedy eyes.
    Dagmar Breece. Jaco Breece’s nemesis. All I had to do was wave her name in front of him and the mean old man started snorting like Ferdinand the Bull.
    Dagmar and Jaco Breece had two passions: cashmere and twentieth-century authors. That was great when they were married and ran a sweater company together for four decades. The business was successful, they had a couple of nice children who grew up and away, they shared a passion for collecting. Then when she was sixty years old, Dagmar fell in love with another man and promptly moved out on her husband. Good riddance.
    What galled Jaco more than losing her, however, was her saying he could keep the rare book and manuscript collection they’d spent years amassing. She would start another with the help of her rich new boyfriend.
    That’s how I came to know them. Several years before, when they were still together, Dagmar came into the store and bought an Edward Dahlberg manuscript I had listed in a catalog. After that, I found a number of things for them, both when they were married and after she left. I liked Dagmar but not Jaco. Not one bit.
    Standing there watching him fume, I wondered how he would have reacted if he’d known I was going to a dinner party at her apartment that night.
    “What else do you have that’s hew?”
    “Some Rilke letters—”
    “Everyone has Rilke letters. He wrote too many.”
    “Jaco, you asked what’s new. I have some letters—Noooo, wait! I have something else that’ll interest you!”
    My store is small, so it was only three steps to the sideboard. I disliked the whole pompous leather-and-dark-oak look of most rare book dealers’ stores, so mine was furnished with 1950s Heywood Wakefield blond wood furniture and a very warm red-and-white Chinese rug. Together they made the room light, slightly odd, and, I hoped, welcoming. I loved books and everything about them. I wanted customers to know that when they walked in.
    The difference between my business and the business of other book and manuscript dealers was that I sold anything else I fancied too.
    Opening a drawer, I took out the long thin case made of crocodile skin. It looked like the kind Victorian gentlemen used for carrying cigars. What I had inside was much better than that. Opening it, I put it down on the counter in front of Jaco, knowing he would go into cardiac arrest when he realized what it was.
    “I don’t collect fountain pens, Miranda.”
    “It’s not a pen. It’s a Mabie Todd.”
    “Then maybe Todd would like it.”
    “Very funny. Look at the barrel.”
    He looked at me like I was trying to pull a fast one but in the end he picked up the largest fountain pen I’d ever seen.
    “So? It’s a pen.”
    “Jaco, turn it around. Look closely.”
    He turned till he saw the name engraved in gold lettering on the black barrel. When he spoke again, his voice was almost a whisper, as if his tongue had grown too big for his throat. “No! Is it?”
    I nodded. “I have authentication.”
    “How did you—”
    “At a Sotheby’s auction last week. I saw it in their catalog. I think it